So many hard choices.... gah!

I'd want resolution, character, and some bit of skill. The problem is that the characters in literature whom I most admire tend to come to bad ends.

OK. I know.

Ragnar Danneskjold, from Atlas Shrugged.

It would be interesting to be Dorian Gray -- but only temporarily.

I have to say, except for the time in which he lived I'm not seeing any downside to being Fitzwilliam Darcy.

As for Bond, he gets tortured and abused too much for my taste. If I were to go for the same sort of advantages (toys, women, being a winner) I'd pick James T. Kirk over him in a heartbeat.

I know who I wouldn’t want to be: Jake Barnes. But Bond, indeed. Though only partly for the reasons Dirda gives.

Yes, Bond’s cool: suave, daring, brave, sophisticated, clever, good-looking, fit and dangerous. He also embodies something that Dirda leaves out, if not getting it wrong altogether. He embodies the ability to be an idealistic hero and a cynic at the same time. That was something new in a protagonist, and truly daring.

Near the end of his piece, Dirda writes: “After all, Bond sees the world in black and white; he’s a spy who never came in from the cold war.” He’s right that Bond never came in from the cold war; he’s almost entirely wrong that Bond sees the world in black and white. In a black and white world, there’s good guys and bad guys; and the good guys do good, and bad guys do bad; in Bond’s world the good guys are assassins, for Christ sake---he has a license to KILL, and he don’t need no stinking judges and juries, either.

In the past, you didn’t have good guys winning using bad guy’s methods. Sure, Henry Fonda would eventually strap on a revolver and go after the bad guys who pushed him past his limit, but he always killed them in a fair fight. He didn’t shoot them in the head, or dynamite them, while they were sleeping. He was a good guy, and good guys didn’t do that. Later, Clint Eastwood created protagonists who used bad guy’s methods against bad guys, but his protagonists were merely cynical; there was no idealism in them at all. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine starts out as a cynic, but, by the end of the film he becomes an idealistic hero. That suggested that trading cynicism for idealism was enough to win the second world war. Whether it was or not, that’s what books and films of that period put forth.

By the time Ian Fleming created James Bond the world was in another war. This time it was the western democracies against international communism. Any thought that this war could be won by the West through an appeal to idealism only, was absurd. It would have been a suicide pact to fight the communists using only the methods of idealistic good guys, like Henry Fonda in a western, as Fonda found out later in Darkness At Noon. Conversely it would have been the death of western values to fight communism using only the cynicism of a Clint Eastwood protagonist. What was needed, and what Fleming created, was a hero who was both idealistic and a cynic. Someone who was ready, willing and able to carry out an extra-judicial killing to keep freedom and democracy alive, so that people didn’t die by extra-judicial killings. Someone who would bed a woman to get information on a bad guy, who he’d then kill; but someone who also fell in love with women, even if he did get them shot out from under him more often than Henry Fonda’s horses. Bond was a Boy Scout and an assassin. Not unlike many of the men who entered the CIA in this country, or MI6 in England. It’s not easy embodying two, more-or-less contradictory principals, and Bond suffered, as did those in the CIA and MI6 who forced themselves to keep both their idealism, and their cynicism. In the end, their ability to do that won the cold war.

Francisco D'Anconia from Atlas Srugged